Fake Plastic Trees
by frays
Summary: "Perfection was what you made it to be, and he made it into Lydia Martin." / Stydia / For the Coppertone Wars "Twelve Days of Christmas" challenge, level three, part two.


**Disclaimer | I do not own Teen Wolf**

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**S**t**i**l**e**s **S**t**i**l**i**n**s**k**i **

.:.

Stiles wanted to hit Aiden, something he didn't care would more likely result in him breaking his wrist than hurting the alpha twin, a concept Stiles hardly understood–how was it possible that the two brothers could mend together? He had seen it countless times, but the principal never made sense to him.

His jaw locked when he saw Aiden lean over Lydia, a hand on the lockers she was leaning against as she giggled at something that passed his lips, grabbing the hand of his that wasn't against the locker and spinning him, pulling him to some empty classroom and locking the door.

He could hear Lydia's light laughter, followed by a squeal of delight that Stiles knew he'd never be able to make the beautiful girl utter, something even his most pleasurable dreams would never be able to create. All he could do was try to tune them out, kicking the bottom of a locker hard and wincing, slamming his locker shut so loudly that even the adolescent couple paused for a moment in their act of attacking each other.

Everyone around him had someone next to them; all of the people he had come to know so well and rely on were preoccupied by love.

Stiles was preoccupied by the same emotion, but his love he held for the strawberry blonde girl was one unrequited, and one that he knew Aiden's physical attraction for the beautiful genius would never be able to measure up to.

He knew Aiden would never be able to love Lydia the way he did, but he also knew that Lydia Martin would never love him even a fraction of the way he did for her.

.:.

In his dreams, he remembered drowning.

When his mind brought him back to the time of his short death, he didn't remember the pain of drowning, or the feeling of the water filling his lungs. He remembered the person holding him down, and he remembered the concerned hysteria in Lydia's eyes as she held him under the water.

Lydia was Stiles lifeline in that moment, and though he knew that some part of Lydia had to care for him to hold him under in the way he did, he wasn't able to wonder if the only reason she had been able to hold him down was simply because of his love for her that he had held for so long.

Even Stiles wasn't so much of a masochist to torture himself with the thoughts–he knew that Lydia was somehow more capable of anchoring the human boy, the sidekick, than anchoring her own best friend onto her life.

When his dreams recreated drowning, they recreated Lydia's beautiful eyes when he came up, and they recreated the command for Lydia to hold him down simply because the tether had to be meaningful, and had to have a connection.

Lydia was always on his mind–her voice, her smiles, her frowns, and her eyes were racing through his mind constantly, and he knew that he had much, much more pertinent things to think of, but when his friends were being attacked by alphas, he wondered where Lydia was, and if she was all right. Even when he was hurt, his mind was only on Lydia, and if she were hurt, or if she were in so much pain as him.

When she was nearly strangled, he felt as though his heart would simply stop beating, launching him into a sort of panic attack.

Even his panic attacks were no longer memories of torture–he remembered clearly Lydia pressing her lips to his, and remembered her gaze, confused as his as she pulled away, tugging at her blue buttoned dress and watching him carefully, watching to see if he were all right.

Watching her with Aiden was torture, but thinking of her was his remedy.

.:.

Stiles had always been the sidekick, the boy behind the werewolf that everyone loved, and wanted for different reasons. He was powerful; he was protected.

Stiles walked in the shadow of his best friend, but he was always too kind to watch it. He had always watched as Scott and Allison fell in and out of love, always trying to make Lydia look at him the way Allison looked at Scott, but Lydia only looked at him as a boy who had had a crush on her since the day that they had met so long.

The strawberry blonde girl was simply a dream, a fragrance he would never be able to smell, and a symphony he would never hear.

He always wondered what the beautiful genius thought of him, but he didn't want to find out at the same time–he was too scared of the answer, too frightened to hear that she felt _nothing_ for him when his dreams were made of Lydia, made of her touch, smell, and taste.

This was, perhaps, the reason dreams were simply _dreams_, and never truly a reality.

.:.

No one but Stiles was home, and he was grateful for that–his fathers late work would allow him more time to be with his thoughts, the realm of his mind more forgiving than life truly was.

In his mind, there wasn't pain, and there wasn't lust.

His destructions were absent when he was alone with his mind, and he could simply think, and be alone with his mind. He could create any story he wished, and he could write a symphony of beauty that his true life would not allow.

He wasn't able to imagine a symphony in which the beautiful strawberry blonde would show up at his doorstep an hour past midnight, looking like both heaven and hell.

Her hair was tangled as though she had tried to pull it out, and she was dressed in only one high-heeled shoe and black dress with a rip in the side, looking like a mark her own nails, now with chipped nail polish, had caused. Her eyes were looking about rapidly, and she looked afraid, seeming as though she were scared something was about to attack.

She was shivering, the thing that pushed the dumbstruck boy into moving, taking her arm gingerly and leading her into the house, then looking for a jacket to give to the shivering girl. He couldn't find such garment, so instead he pulled away his long-sleeved shirt, helping the girl who looked now startled into it.

"Stiles–"

"You don't have to talk, Lydia." Her teeth chattered when she tried to speak to him, and Stiles ushered her into his bedroom, always strangely the warmest room in the Stilinski residence.

"I want to talk." Lydia pushed off her other shoe gently, sitting on Stiles' bed. She didn't seem to notice when the adoring boy pulled his sheets around her tightly to warm her, "I think I'm going insane."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm going _insane_, Stiles! I–I keep seeing things, or people, and I keep having visions whenever people die, and they _hurt_. They hurt so badly, and not all of them are when people die. I don't know why I'm having them, but I hate them. I–I–"

"Lydia you're _not_ going insane. You're just some sort of witch, or banshee–"

"_It's not that_, Stiles. It's Beacon Hills, and it's everything here–there's so many wolves, and people dying, and everyone is looking to _me_ for help like I'm some fortune teller who knows every answer there is, and I don't know what to do, or how to help _anyone_."

"Lydia–"

"I can't take it anymore, Stiles."

"Then run away."

His words were soft, but the strawberry blonde looked up at him, her green eyes catching with his in a way that made him feel as though he were drowning again, falling in the green pools of her endless eyes and gasping for air that wouldn't come–it would never come while he was next to Lydia.

"Stiles, I can't. I–I don't have anyone, and I don't have anywhere to go–"

"You'll have me."

.:.

Lydia was stretched along the passenger seat of Stiles' truck, her long, slender legs pulled up and crossed over the dashboard in a way that made it hard for Stiles to focus on the road. Her dress had come up dangerously high on her porcelain legs, her back arched, her strawberry blonde hair flying in the wind of the open window. Her lipstick was gone, her mascara smudged by the bottom of her green eyes, making her look alluring in a disconcerting way he had never seen the perfect teenage girl before.

She was sipping a bottle of water she had picked up, something Stiles knew was to prevent her genius mind from destruction by alcohol, something she avoided like the plague when she wasn't by her friends who expected her to be the perfect party girl, the image of happiness and security.

It was a title she could not achieve–not before, and not now with her abnormal mind and her talents she herself could hardly understand. Her visions, dreams, and mind made it impossible to be the airhead atop a throne of followers she was always expected to be–she was supposed to be the sane one in all of this, and she was circling the drain when she realized it was near-impossible to be what everyone expected her to be.

They didn't speak; they simply listened to the throbbing beat of Radiohead pulsing through the old speakers as he drove, every turn of the tires bringing him farther and farther from Beacon Hills.

.:.

She was circling the drain, falling away from everything she had known and loved. She was changed, and she was destroyed in a way only Stiles could see; she was crumbling away, falling under the release of pressure to be perfect, so sudden that she didn't know how stand with the people around her, only having the brown-eyed boy to keep her from slipping away completely.

He held up both Lydia and himself simply because he loved her, possibly more than he loved himself.

He stayed next to her in her destruction, and built her back whenever she would fall, picking up the pieces left behind by the reckless girl and cleaning whatever mess she left behind her because she knew she wasn't _strong_ enough to take after herself–she was more damaged now than he had ever seen the girl because she didn't know how to be any less than perfect.

She wasn't Lydia any longer, but Stiles loved her still.

She had always been the picture of perfection to Stiles–no matter how shattered she became, she was always beautiful, and no matter what façade she slipped into, he still believed her to be perfection.

Perfection was what you made it to be, and he made it into Lydia Martin.

.:.

Lydia still had nightmares, and her shrieks would often wake Stiles in the middle of the night, rousing him from dreams where he would be simply _with_ Lydia, and away from all the trouble loving the beautiful strawberry blonde had caused him.

It pained him to hear her shrieks because he could feel her terror, and he could see through her tossing and turning how afraid she was that she would be hurt or killed, never being able to differentiate between her dreams and reality.

He went to the beautiful genius, and he brought her into his arms gingerly, whispering in her ears that she was all right and stroking her strawberry blonde hair, protective of her in a way that made him feel like he was the one losing grip on reality.

Her tears looked like crystals, and her hair and scent was made of a sweet vanilla that intoxicated him and twisted him inside, making it impossible to convince himself that he was purely comforting her–it was impossible to hold the trembling girl so close and ignore the fire and sparks, and to ignore the desire he held for her, something dangerous that only grew when he held her to close to 'comfort her', knowing inside that it would never be purely comfort.

It was salvation for his own soul–he needed her in a way that he could hardly understand, and he craved her in a way he would never be able to voice. He loved her skin, her lips he had only touched once, her broken perfection, her strawberry blonde hair, her shattered green eyes, and her sweet voice that constantly haunted his dreams, good or bad.

She believed she was going insane, but Stiles was insane–she made him a different person, and she drove him to distances that he didn't have a clue to come back from, but he didn't care.

He was lost in Lydia, and lost in her shivering touch of heat, flames, and empty perfection.

.:.

The second time she had kissed him, he had trouble defining the blurred lines between his fantastical dreams and the reality he had come to know as harsh, always unforgiving.

The kiss had come after months of falling downwards; spinning out of control into a rabbit hold there was no chance of climbing out of. She was anchored to the ground by Stiles only, and she clung onto the brown-eyed boy tightly so that she could cling onto her sanity, the world between her terrors and her imagination now impossible to tell apart.

They had kissed on Christmas Eve, less than ten minutes before Christmas would fall. The streets were black, only illuminated by the flickering lights from the streetlights, far away from the adolescent teenagers.

She was sitting on the front of his car, wearing a pair of small shorts, a tank top, Stiles' flannel unbuttoned, and a pair of red converse. She stopped caring about looking perfect, making the girl always perfect to the brown-eyed boy seem even more stunning, her skin shining and her smile never as plastic as it used to be.

She was laughing at something Stiles couldn't see, swinging her slender legs on the car in a display of _joy_, an emotion he hadn't seen in the beautiful girl in so long. He turned his head to see the object of her amusement, finding nothing when he looked.

"What are you laughing at?"

"You."

"Why?"

Lydia grinned at Stiles, a devilish spark of mischief in her eyes that he hadn't seen in so long. The bright look in her emerald eyes surprised him, and he found himself standing closer to her, leaning against the car over her. She only laughed more, her smile something he knew he would cling onto later, using the beautiful glint in her eyes as a form of salvation through the depths of hell he had been dragged through in the impossible game of loving Lydia Martin.

"I don't know why. You just…do."

"Do what?"

"Make me laugh, idiot."

"No one else can master being a beautiful genius like you can, Lydia."

A blanket of silence was draped over them, and she looked up at him with wide green eyes, looking half-startled, half-amused.

There was something else in her eyes, some sense of wonder and thought he had never seen present in the strawberry blonde girls eyes. She watched him carefully as though she had been blind to him for the whole of her life, and was seeing the doe-eyed boy for the first time.

Her green eyes fixated on his brown ones, a mixture of mint and chocolate that was both silent and crackling. Her eyes flickered down to his full lips for only a moment, and Stiles snapped.

For months, the boy had repressed lust and love, the mixture of the desirable emotions welling inside of him like a weak dam, quivering and ready to be emptied _somehow_. Every look, smile, or touch was a wave of rushing water against the weakening dam, something the brown-eyed sidekick had little control over.

The walls he held to keep himself from loving Lydia too strongly was weakening, and the look broke the trembling walls.

He bend down and let his lips touch her plush ones, letting his eyes fall closed as he was drowned slowly by a medley of flames and glory, pushing through him and consuming him as her lithe arms went around his neck, moving her lips harshly and fiercely against his.

They kissed in a way that was almost desperate, using each others lips as a drug and a remedy to cure the demons that had grown inside them and torn them from the outside in.

Their hands roamed each others bodies as though a blind man would search for a familiar landscape, their lips so rough on each other that they seemed to be cutting each other open and climbing into each other more so than simply kissing each other, but it wasn't a simple kiss.

The kiss was a movement of the hands, lips, and bodies moving against each other, breathing hard and hearts pounding as they consumed each other over and over by sparks and heat until they were soon drowning in a constantly rolling fire.

Lydia's body was trembling softly against his, her nervous energy only driving him to kiss her more roughly, pressing her back against the hood of his car, nearly lying on top of her.

Their world was only fire and crackling electricity, one spark away from combusting completely.

.:.

When Lydia slept in the arms of the brown-eyed boy, her nightmares refused to come, too scared of the protective spirit of the boy to terrorize her sleeping mind when he was there to hold her tightly.

It took years longer than it did Stiles, but Lydia slowly fell for the sidekick and his dorky quirks, the gullible boy balancing out the beautiful genius completely.

In ways, they were both flawed. Neither of them were perfect, but they were held as perfection in the others eyes, all the other needed to keep them alive in the crazy realm that we call living.

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**Authors Note | This is one of my more-favored onexshots that I've written, mainly because I love Stydia so much.**

**For the Coppertone Wars "Twelve Days of Christmas" challenge, level three, part two.**

**Question Of The Day:**

**Should I start a Stydia multichap?**

**M**y **r**e**v**i**e**w **b**o**x** i**s** h**u**n**g**r**y**–**p**l**e**a**s**e **f**e**e**d**!**!**!**


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